It's the loss of people that really hurts (Frances Coleman)

As I reflect on this column, to be published on the last day of the last month in which the Press-Register is a seven-days-a-week newspaper, I remember that a change in the “platform” — the way of disseminating news and the style in which it’s done — does not matter much. That kind of change will always be with us.

What hurts is the loss — the irredeemable loss of colleagues who embody a whole way of doing a thing.

I knew one such man very well when he worked at the Press-Register in the 1990s. His name was Billy Joe Richey — we called him B.J. — and he was a real newspaper man.

I eulogized him in a small-town funeral chapel 12 years ago, explaining to his friends that words were B.J.’s business, as they are still mine:

But words are poor servants to describe this man, and who he was, and what he did for us. His accomplishments are not merely yellowed clippings in cardboard boxes. His legacy to his craft is the group of men and women — me included — who stretched to meet his standards. He was a good writer, but he was special because he knew the truth when he saw it, and hated every lie he ever heard.

B.J. was what my Jewish friends call a “mensch” — he was a real man.

He loved to expose self-serving half-truths, and those who told them. He called it “kicking over slop jars.” He enjoyed kicking them over as much as the pompous and self-important hated him doing it.

He was important to me because of who he was and how he forced the truth out of those would rather lie.

He told the truth and kept his commitments.

He was long on substance and short on form. He was, as you’d imagine, a meticulous writer and editor. A factual error would send B.J. right into orbit. A careless mistake in usage or grammar would cause him to snort and curse the ignorant writer who was too lazy to learn the language.

It’s hard to find people like B.J. anymore. He was a hard-working, honest professional who never misspelled a name and who considered being beaten to a story by another news organization a personal and painful failure.

He would not lie, and woe to those who tried to lie to him. When he covered the space program for Newhouse News Service, he knew rockets; when he wrote about government, he knew the inside of every piece of legislation; when he wrote editorials for me, he understood every nuance and every personality.

Newsmen like B.J. are no more.

I concluded my eulogy with this: Those stuffed shirts called “management consultants” say that supervisors should not make close friends with those who work for them. I thank God now that I broke that rule. He always helped me tell the truth, and I could never receive a better gift than that.

There is no greater calling, and no higher good, than telling the truth.

No matter what changes come, losing journalists who have the ability and the calling to tell the truth is a terrible and blinding loss — not just of one life or one friend, but the loss of the very purpose for which we exist.